Towers in the Mist

by Elizabeth Goudge

  But some while after eleven o’clock had struck, and the deadness of the night lay heavy upon them, Canon Leigh was silent again and his face dropped into his hands so that Joyeuce could no longer see it. . . . She was obliged to look again at Giles. . . . And at the first glance she nearly cried out with astonishment, for a change had taken place in him. The last shadow of rebellion had gone from his face and he looked like the little boy she had played with years ago. She stood up and bent over him, her lips parted in eagerness, and almost at the same moment his eyes opened and he looked at her, smiling. At once the barrier was down between them and they were as close together as they had been in the little parlor. News of a far country. With one brief smile Giles told more of it than a hundred books could have done. Then he sighed, turned over, and buried his cheek in his pillow like a child going to sleep.

  Joyeuce knelt down and covered her face with her hands, but her heart within her was like a singing bird. She heard her father get up and heard his shuddering sigh as he bent over Giles. Then he too knelt down and began to pray aloud, brokenly, stately Latin prayers for the dead through which beat, like a pulse, the deep notes of the clock striking midnight. It was a bell that tolled for Giles’s passing, she knew, and yet her heart was like a singing bird.

  Ten minutes later, leaving her father alone with his dead son, she was running like a winged creature through the moonlit house, her skirts held up on either side and her feet seeming hardly to touch the floor as she went. She had news to tell, good news, and she did not stand upon the order of her going as she ran from group to group of the wakeful, heartbroken household. On the stairs she found Grace, Faithful and the little boys huddled together in a forlorn heap, the tears on their faces bright in the pallid moonlight. “Do not cry, little loves,” she adjured them. “Heaven is beyond the stars.” Then before they had time to do more than gaze stupidly at her transfigured face she was off again, flying down the stairs to the kitchen where Diggory sat on a wooden stool, staring stupidly into space, and Dorothy sat at the kitchen table with her head in her arms. They too gazed at her stupefied as she stood in a moonbeam like a visitant from another world, tiptoe for flight. “You must not grieve,” she told them. “There is another country.”

  And then she was gone again, flying back up the stairs to Great-Aunt. For the first time in her life she was not afraid of her, even though it was black night in Great-Aunt’s bedroom, with the thick curtains drawn to hide the stars and only one rushlight to relieve the gloom. She did not wait for Great-Aunt to pop out from behind the curtains, she pulled them back herself, and stood looking tenderly at the redoubtable old lady where she sat stiffly against her piled pillows, her face in its starched nightcap suddenly become pathetically and incredibly old. For Great-Aunt had suffered during Giles’s illness. It had brought back to her the deaths of her own children in a way that had actually hurt her. Moreover it had put her in mind of her own approaching end, and tonight, as the great clock tolled the passing hours, she had sat behind her curtains in the grip of a fear she had never known before. Her eyes, usually so bright, were without light, her chin trembled and her claw-like hands clutched at the counterpane.

  “The boy is dead?” she whispered, and then her jaw dropped as she stared at her transfigured great-niece. . . . She had never seen any human creature look so unearthly. . . . Joyeuce looked as though drenched with light. She reminded Great-Aunt of some lovely flower held up between the watcher and the sun, so that each delicate petal is tipped with flame and the secret of the sun itself seems caught at the heart of the flower. Great-Aunt felt a pang of desolation as she realized that something had been told to Joyeuce that would never be told to her. She had enjoyed life, she had enjoyed it far more than Joyeuce was ever likely to do, yet at this moment, if she could have gone back to the beginning again, she would have given all her pleasure in exchange for Joyeuce’s sorrows if she could have had with them only a few of those rare moments of sure knowledge.

  “Not dead,” said Joyeuce, “only born again,” and drawing the curtains she passed on into her own room, leaving Great-Aunt to wonder if she had really seen Joyeuce or if what she had seen had been a vision from beyond the stars.

  The twins and Diccon were all fast asleep in the four-posters. Joyeuce bent over them, glad that they were asleep, glad that they were still in the country of childhood where sorrow is only a rumor outside the gate that they hear vaguely but do not understand. They would meet Giles in that country, perhaps, meet him with a freedom and ease that would never be hers until her life was over and her sorrows done.

  She shivered a little as she went to the window to draw the curtains across the view of her city that she loved so greatly. Her joy was still with her but it had heard the first whisper of the returning tide of sorrow and had shrunk in a little upon itself. It was with the knowledge that soon she would be wanting comfort and reassurance again that she opened the window and leaned out, her eyes clinging to the familiar outlines of roofs and towers that would last out the span of her own life and so would never forsake her. A little rustle of movement by the Fair Gate made her look down and she saw three cloaked figures, with a dog at their feet, sitting at the foot of the stairs that led up to Nicolas’s room. They got up when they saw her open the window and stood uncertainly, not knowing what to do. . . . Heather­thwayte, Nicolas and Philip Sidney waiting for news of Giles. . . . She stretched out her hand towards them in pity, for their dark wavering figures, shadowy and unsubstantial in the moonlight, looked like poor wraiths lost in a night of bewilderment. But only one of them had the courage to come to her, and it was not Nicolas, it was Philip Sidney.

  He stood under the window looking up at her, his bright hair silvered by the moonlight and his beautiful face grave and sorrowful. “You need not tell me, mistress,” he said gently. “I know by your face.”

  “But it is all true, what they say,” she whispered shyly, “it is only in the sight of the unwise they seem to die.”

  He met her eyes with a brave certainty that was steadier though less joyous than hers. “Spiritus redeat ad Deum, qui dedit illum,” he said. Then he bowed to her courteously and drew back.

  Over his head her eyes sought for the tall thin shadow that was Nicolas. It was he who should have come to her, not Philip Sidney, who was almost a stranger to her. Why had he been afraid to come to her? As she turned away from the window returning sorrow was not a far-off whisper but an ominous mutter. She climbed on to the bed and fell face downwards, lying rigid, waiting as a sufferer waits for the return of inevitable pain.

  4.

  It so submerged her during the next few days that it was hard even to remember her faith and joy of a few nights ago. The door had opened to let Giles go from one country to another and for just a moment the light from that other country had shone full upon her, but now the door was shut and she could not see even a crack of light beneath it. Yet it had been. What had happened had happened. The light had been hers and it had come from somewhere. It was a fact. If just now she was too exhausted and stricken to rejoice in it she yet possessed it; it was a possession forever.

  On the afternoon of the day following Giles’s funeral, without even stopping to get her cloak, she ran out through the garden gate into the Meadows. The house and everyone in it pressed upon her so that she felt at breaking point. Great-Aunt, fretful and complaining, the children with their ceaseless questions, Grace with her irritating efficiency and her father as still in his grief as a winter stream bound down by ice. . . . If only he would not be so still. . . . She saw in his stillness a reflection of her own. When they were together they could only sit silently, powerless to help each other.

  But outside, under the winter trees, there was help. It had been raining all the morning, a misty rain that had hidden the earth like a shroud, but now it had thinned and vanished into a soft blue haze shot through with sunshine. The exquisite coloring of the winter trees was lit by the pale gleams; in
the distance the network of bare twigs showed faint amethyst and rust color, near at hand they were filaments of black lace strung with diamond raindrops. There were threads of silver where the streams ran though the rain-misted grass and beside them the smooth willow shoots smoldered orange and deep crimson, lit to flame when the sun touched them. The whole world was full of the muted sound of water, the steady murmur of the swiftly-flowing river and the soft drip of the water-laden trees. It was still strangely warm for December. The air was soft and moist and caressing. Twice, flashing from the silvered twigs of a tree-top to the crimson of the willows below, Joyeuce saw the blue body of a kingfisher. She was used to these days of misted warmth and color, for they came often in the sheltered Thames valley, blooming among the harsh dark days of wind and rain like roses in midwinter, but never before, she thought, had there been a December day as lovely as this one. In spite of her misery she could not help but be a little comforted by the beauty of it, for it was a fragile and tender beauty that crept into her almost by stealth. She would have shut tired eyes against the blaze of summer, but these soft colors were kind to weariness. The triumphant shouting of the birds in springtime would have seemed to her a cruel mockery but the soft drip of the raindrops was a sound attuned to her sorrow and held a kind of peace.

  She felt a sudden uprush of thankfulness for the comradeship of the earth. It seemed to her at that moment the only friend who never failed. Its beauty was ever renewed and its music unceasing. Death could not touch it or the years estrange. While she lived the earth was hers and the glory of it, and standing still on the path she held out her arms to the gold and blue of the sun-shot haze, to the slipping silver water and the crimson willow shoots that edged it, to the rain-drenched grass and the blue swerve of the kingfisher’s flight. . . . But her arms were empty. . . . Her friend the earth could sing her lullabies and brighten her eyes with its beauty but it was at once too frail and too great for intimacy. She remembered how once as a little girl she had kissed a wild rose in a passion of affection, but its petals had fallen to the ground at the touch of her lips: and another time upon a journey she had seen in the distance a little blue hill small enough to be picked up and played with; yet when she came up to it, she found it as tall as a church tower. She felt again, as she had felt on May morning, that sense of beauty’s continual withdrawal. It is a light flickering always at the end of the road, a distant trumpet call from a land that is hidden behind a hill. A cold shivering fit took her and hiding her face in her hands she began to cry for the first time since Giles had died.

  Then through the sound of her own sobbing and the drip of the raindrops she heard a queerly reassuring sound, the sharp snapping of fallen twigs and the sound of footsteps on the sodden path. She stopped shivering and a lovely glow of warmth stole over her. She did not need to look up to know who it was. Once before, on May morning, she had longed for the beauty and mystery of earth that she worshiped to be gathered up into some human form that she could love, and she had looked down from her window into the face of Nicolas.

  So certain was she that she did not even look up when he flung his arms impetuously round her, but leaning her face with her hands still covering it against his shoulder cried with the abandon of a child. It was heaven to be, for once in a way, so abandoned. It was heaven to feel his arms tremble with rage at the fates that had so hurt her. It was heaven to feel so protected and so cared for. Love had been sweet on Midsummer Eve, but now, coming so hard upon the heels of sorrow, it was an ecstasy almost too great to be borne.

  “Do not cry, little love,” Nicolas implored her, but she only cried the more, and picking her up he carried her over the wet grass to where a little bench stood beneath a sparkling hawthorn tree. Then wrapping his cloak about the two of them he sat beside her, holding her so close that she could feel his heart beating and the warmth of his body like fire running through her veins.

  “I was walking by the river,” he told her softly. “There was no one in the Meadows. The world seemed empty. Nothing to be seen but the bare branches, nothing to be heard but dropping water. I thought of you and of how when you are unhappy your eyes are the color of rain. Then I looked up and saw you standing far off under the trees dressed all in black. I thought that you looked so mysterious, like sorrow herself. And then you held out your arms and so I came to you.”

  For the first time Joyeuce opened her eyes and looked at him for a moment, and used as she was to the hues of mourning his brilliance dazzled her. He must have been to some party, for his doublet was as blue as the kingfisher’s wing and his cloak was lined with crimson. He had a little jeweled dagger in his belt and his ruff was as white as snow. She fingered his dagger with the delight of a child and rubbed her cheek against his cloak. “You must always be beautiful and gay, Nicolas,” she told him, rejoicing in him. “It would be terrible if you were not to be gay.”

  “That’s as life wills,” said Nicolas soberly, and she looked up at him, startled, for she had never heard his voice so empty of laughter. And his face, too, was changed. It was older and graver. The eyes were more somber, as though there was new knowledge behind them, and the lips pressed against each other almost sternly.

  “Has anything happened, Nicolas?” she asked.

  “Giles has died,” he said.

  Joyeuce nodded, understandingly. It was the first time in his life that death had dared to touch anyone he cared for. She knew what that felt like. She knew what a glorious expectation of certain happiness one builds upon the foundations of a happy childhood, and how the first grief sends the whole fabric tumbling into ruins.

  “And it might have been you,” whispered Nicolas.

  Again she understood. He had discovered, now, the fear at the heart of love. He felt the torment that she had felt in the garden at the Tavern when she thought what a little thing might snap the thread of his life. She twisted her hands together, wondering how to comfort him, how to tell him what she now knew.

  “It’s not as bad as you think, Nicolas,” she whispered. “The deeper you go into pain the more certain are you that all that happens to you has an explanation and a purpose. You don’t know what they are but you know they are there. You don’t suffer any the less because of the certainty but you would rather suffer and have it than just enjoy yourself and not have it.” Her voice trailed away and she looked out sadly over the landscape of sunlit fields and trees and water. What pitiful creatures were human beings, able to speak only so falteringly of what they knew, separated even from those they loved best by ignorances and insincerities and reserves so innumerable that there seemed no sweeping them away. Only the earth, with its winds and waters and its field sown with a thousand flowers, could tell aright of the mystery of which it was the garment. . . . But our ears are too dull to hear.

  But Nicolas’s arms, strong and compelling, were about her again. “You are going to marry me,” he said. “You are going to marry me as soon as ever it can be arranged.”

  “Would you be mated to sorrow?” she asked him. “You said, when you saw me in the distance, that I looked like sorrow herself.”

  “Sorrow and joy go hand in hand,” he said, “and I want them both. The night Giles died, when Philip Sidney and I were waiting outside in the quadrangle and you opened your window and leaned out, I did not go to you as he did because I felt afraid of sorrow. And then the moon shone full on your face and when I saw the joy of it, Joyeuce, I wanted your joy more than anything else upon earth. I think I changed in that moment. I am not now what I was.”

  “But it is you who know all about joy,” she said. “You are always gay.”

  “I can be gay,” said Nicolas. “I was born knowing how to suck the last drop of fun out of every experience that comes along, and be so busy over it that I have no time to think and worry and question like you do, but I don’t know joy. That’s something different, something deeper. That’s the certainty you talked of. It is a mystery to me, and I wan
t it. In you I shall have it.”

  “Don’t talk like that!” cried Joyeuce in a panic. “I am only an ordinary human girl. There is no mystery in me.”

  “If you did not seem mysterious to me I should not love you,” said Nicolas wisely. “You seem to stand to me for all I long for. I do not quite know what I long for, but whatever it is I seem to have it when I have you.”

  “I feel like that too,” said Joyeuce softly, and then, after a moment’s silence, she cried out in dismay, “Nicolas, Nicolas, what will happen if we get to know each other so well that there is no more mystery? Will the end of mystery be the end of love?”

  “Why should there be an end of mystery?” asked Nicolas. “Isn’t a woman always a mysterious creature to a man, and a man to a woman? When you are an old woman I shall look into your eyes and find my joy there; and as for you, Joyeuce, I think you are so faithful that you will forgive me my sins again and again and find some beauty in me up till the end.”

  It was that word “faithful” that recalled Joyeuce to herself. He was saying that she was faithful. But she was not. The care of the children was a trust, and she was being faithless to it. In this time of grief, when her family surely needed her more than ever before, she was planning marriage with Nicolas. Still sheltered beneath Nicolas’s cloak she pressed her hands together in an agony. Had the fight to be fought all over again? Here, close to Nicolas, she felt warm and safe and happy, but separated from him the cold of the gathering dusk would be all round her, and a loneliness unspeakable. . . . It seemed like the choice between life and death. . . . Yet in these last months her spirit had become so attuned to sacrifice that now she acted almost automatically, slipping from beneath Nicolas’s cloak and sliding to the far end of the seat, both her small hands held out to warn him off.